THE SONS OF COMMUNISM

Published: March 8, 1987

ONE IS A 52-YEAR-OLD Czechoslovak engineer; the other, a 38-year-old Hungarian architect.

Both are political dissidents involved with the hounded antitotalitarian opposition in their countries. They have met only once, and then just long enough to shake hands and acknowledge their symmetrical fates. What links Rudolf Slansky and Laszlo Rajk is that both are the sons and namesakes of famous Communist fathers who were hanged some 35 years ago after confessing to concocted accusations in widely publicized show trials.

If their fathers' lives and deaths are out of ''Darkness at Noon,'' then the destinies of the sons, in a sense, represent sequels to the Arthur Koestler work. The fathers, under torture and weighed down by the chains of party discipline, admitted to false accusations and so affirmed a system they believed in, perhaps even on the gallows; the sons now question even the legends that have grown up around their fathers and so challenge that system.

Today, in chilly, politically repressed Prague and in a much more open but still far from free Budapest, the two men carry their notorious names into dissidence and opposition. Rajk, who never knew his father, does so with a challenging, provocative Hungarian swagger; Slansky, with quiet reserve and reticence. Through nearly four decades of wildly shifting fortunes, both men have suffered persecution, banishment, shame and confusion. They have alternatively sought answers and the comfort of silence.

At different times, they have met people who regarded their fathers as heroes, victims, martyrs, marionettes, fools and villains. Their own attitudes to the men after whom they were named remain understandably complicated. They have thought of changing their names, but they will not.

They were the innocent children of prominent fathers who, as the second most powerful Communist figures in their respective countries, had once been cast as pioneering heroes of a new consciousness. Then, as Stalin's paranoia was heightened by Tito's apostasy in Yugoslavia, their fathers were arrested, condemned and executed as traitors, only to be exonerated years later(Continued on Page 54) and, in time, restored to at least partial honor.

Today, the sons are often shunned by the ruling elites and the more career-minded, not so much as ideological pariahs but as people with whom friendship and contact can spell bureaucratic trouble. They socialize mostly with other dissidents and artists, loose networks of kindred spirits numbering several dozens.

They are, like Adam Michnik, the Polish adviser to Solidarity; Miklos Haraszti, the Hungarian underground editor, and many of the members of Czechoslovakia's Charter 77 human-rights group, people raised in leftist traditions as sons and daughters of parents who at times endured prison and torture for what they believed to be a redemptive Communism.

Within a month of acknowledging his guilt as a Trotskyite, a spy for the West, a Titoist, a bourgeois nationalist and a revisionist in September 1949, the elder Rajk, who had been Hungary's Interior Minister and then Foreign Minister, was hanged in a prison courtyard execution that his wife overheard but could not see from her own cell.

Years later, his body was removed from an unmarked grave and reinterred under an impressive monument in a ceremony attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners during the restless year of 1956. There is newsreel footage showing his son, who was only nine months old when his father was executed, smiling in seeming bewilderment as he shoveled dirt into the grave. Standing next to him is the mother the boy had come to know only two years earlier, after her release from prison and his own departure from an orphanage where he was not told his rightful name.

In the case of Slansky, who had been Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, there is no grave at all. Three years after he was hanged in 1952, his then-still-interned widow was finally sent an official certificate that listed the cause of death as ''suffocation from hanging.''

After nine further years of inquiry, Josefa Slansky was notified that her husband's remains had been cremated and that the urn containing his ashes was later destroyed to make room for others. The salutation ending the correspondence from the Ministry of the Interior read, ''With comradely greetings.''

Like many others living in Eastern Europe, I had become fascinated by the ways in which incomplete pasts -partly censored, often revised and, these days, increasingly challenged -haunt both the leaders and citizens of Communist states. I sensed that, taken as metaphor, the lives of the younger Rajk and Slansky reflected the dilemmas of faith and credibility in a system where public accounts so often differed from what your mother or grandmother told you, or, in some cases, from what happened to your father. Over several months, I sought out both men.

T HE YOUNGER Laszlo Rajk is fully aware of the embarrassment his name and his presence cause Hungary's leaders, and he rejoices in this recognition. Tall and handsome, he looks very much like his father. For a while, he openly ran what he calls a samizdat boutique in his Budapest apartment, selling underground literature, but that ended with his eviction by municipal authorities. Earlier, he had traveled to Poland to meet dissidents who taught him the fine points of clandestine printing. And in 1985, when the Hungarian Government liberalized the election laws, he tried to gain a nomination for Parliament as a nonparty independent candidate.